Maintain, Continue and Repair

EJE invites writers, researchers, artists, and practitioners to contribute to our upcoming issue.

Drawing on Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher's definition of care as everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world, this issue asks: what does it mean to tend to what already exists? How do practices of care, repair, and continuity shape the way we think, make, and relate?

We welcome texts from a wide range of disciplines, formats, and perspectives.

Download the full open call and submission guidelines at:
www.eje-revista.com/open-calls

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Maintain, Continue and Repair In Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (2019) propose care as a critical framework for rethinking architecture, urbanism, and their relationship to the planet. Drawing together diverse disciplines, practices, and forms of knowledge, they challenge dominant models of development and argue that the future cannot be repaired by the same extractive, capital-driven systems that produced today’s ecological and social crises. Their work also suggests that care extends beyond environmental concerns: it offers a way of understanding architecture as an ongoing practice of sustaining lives, relationships, institutions, infrastructures, and territories. Rather than privileging moments of creation or construction, care foregrounds the continuous labor required to maintain, adapt, and keep worlds livable.

To ground this framework, Fitz and Krasny (2019, 13) draw on Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s definition of care as a “species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world,’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Tronto and Fisher 1990, quoted in Fitz and Krasny 2019, 13) — a world that includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, woven together in a life-sustaining web. Care, in this sense, becomes fundamental not only to ecological survival but to the continuation of social, material, cultural, and architectural worlds across human and more-than-human relations1 .

Seen this way, care invites us to rethink architecture itself — not as the production of new objects or spaces, but as a practice of stewardship, attention, maintenance, repair, and responsibility. It asks what deserves to be sustained, whose labor enables that continuity, and how acts of preservation and transformation shape both the built environment and the relationships that constitute it. As ecological, social, economic, and territorial pressures intensify, the questions become harder to avoid: What are our responsibilities toward the worlds we inhabit? How might practices of care, maintenance, and repair sustain life? What forms of labor, knowledge, and relationship does that sustaining require?

As Chris Brooks’s (2018) interview with anthropologist David Graeber put it, most labor isn’t about making things at all — it’s the cleaning, tending, and fixing that keeps things going: “You make a cup once. You wash it a thousand times.” If architecture has historically celebrated novelty, construction, and production, perhaps it is time to turn toward the practices that sustain the world already around us: maintenance, stewardship, adaptation, restoration, care, and the often- invisible labor through which buildings, communities, landscapes, and institutions endure. This open call seeks projects, practices, stories, and reflections that inspire us to care, maintain, repair, and continue life. We invite contributors to examine repair not only as a technical intervention but as a social, ecological, political, cultural, and architectural practice — one that requires attention, responsibility, reciprocity, and long-term commitment, whether directed toward buildings, infrastructures, communities, territories, ecosystems, practices, or forms of knowledge. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

• Maintenance of the built environment as architectural labor
• Care for architectural workers: labor conditions, wages, risks, and investments
• Practices of reuse, refurbishment, repair, renovation, restoration, and adaptive transformation • Care for communities and collective forms of inhabitation
• Care for territories, landscapes, forests, soils, and ecosystems
• Care for rivers, lakes, wetlands, oceans, and other bodies of water
• Care for human and more-than-human lives • Care for existing buildings, infrastructures, and material resources
• Craftsmanship, attention, and the ethics of making and maintaining
• Cultural memory, local knowledge, and intergenerational practices of stewardship
• Mutual aid, solidarity, and collective forms of care Within this framework, we invite contributors to reflect on questions such as:
• How might care and repair reshape the ontological and epistemological foundations of architectural theory and practice?
• If the world is understood as fundamentally fragile, unfinished, and subject to decay, what does that imply for the role of architects today?
• What does it mean to sustain something — and what, exactly, are we sustaining?
• Are there systems, infrastructures, or ways of living that should not be sustained? How do we distinguish between maintenance and transformation?
• What forms of care remain invisible within architectural discourse and practice?
• How can maintenance, repair, stewardship, and regeneration become central rather than peripheral to architectural thinking?

Through situated examples, our goal is to expand the vocabulary of care, repair, and continuity, and to explore how architecture, landscape, urbanism, and allied practices might contribute to more just, resilient, and livable futures. We invite essays, projects, built works, artistic interventions, photographs, drawings, maps, field notes, conversations, speculative proposals, and other forms of inquiry that make visible the labor, knowledge, and relationships required to sustain life.

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References
Brooks, Chris. 2018. “Booked: Imagining a World with No Bullshit Jobs.” Interview with David Graeber. Dissent, August 16. https://dissentmagazine.org/online_ articles/booked-david-graeber-bullshit-jobs/.
Fitz, Angelika, and Elke Krasny, eds. 2019. Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tronto, Joan C., and Berenice Fisher. 1990. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring.” In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, edited by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson, 35–62. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Editorial process
editorialeje-revista.com

1. Submission of abstracts or preliminary proposals for the issue (200 words);
2. Individual, collective, written, visual and sound proposals may be submitted;
3. After acceptance of the abstract or preliminary proposal, a deadline of seven weeks will be given to submit the full contribution;
4. Full written texts should not exceed 2,000 words. A margin of 10% is allowed. Texts exceeding this limit will not be published;
5. If accepted, image-based or multimedia works should be discussed with the editorial board to adapt their editing format;
6. Authors must ensure that they have the publishing rights to all images and other media used. Eje will not publish content submitted without the correct rights of use, publication and distribution;
7. Images and other media must be submitted in black and white (saved as grey-scale);
8. All contributions must be submitted as .docx or editable files;
9. All essays should be referenced using the Chicago referencing style, included in the text, and with the list of references at the end;
10. A brief biographical sketch (100 words) and an identifying portrait or image (in black and white);
11. Contributions should be organised and presented in a way that is accessible to all, including those without an academic background. Footnotes should not exceed 10 per essay.

Contributions will be subjected to the following editorial process:
1. Abstracts will be reviewed by the editorial board and all submissions will be reviewed and responded to.
2. Submitted contributions will be reviewed initially by the editorial board with the following review options:
• Accept
• Accepted with changes
• Rejection
3. Accepted abstracts will be developed into full contributions.
4. Where there is no consensus from the editorial board, contributions will be sent to experts in the field of the subject matter through a double-blind selection process.
5. Once the double-blind selection process has been completed, the editorial board will respect the outcome of the double-blind revision.

TIMELINE
07-07-2026 – Publication of Open Call
31-07-2026 – Deadline for submission of abstracts (200 words) and author description (100 words).
14-08-2026 – Information about acceptance or rejection of abstract.
Successful participants will be given seven weeks from acceptance to develop and finalise their contribution.
Further information relating to deadlines for final submissions, publishing, etc. will be released for those whose abstracts are accepted. Publication is anticipated for the autumn of 2026.

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About Eje
Eje is a self-edited and self-published journal focused on architecture, territory and culture. Through it, we seek to stimulate and diversify the current conversation around space in Mexico and Latin America. We understand publishing as a critical practice so, from a multidisciplinary and situated perspective, we propose to the from the side of the other: other voices, other discourses and other means of expression. Eje is a biannual publication, published in physical and digital formats and is edited, printed and distributed from Mexico City. We currently have points of sale in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Madrid, Barcelina, Lyon, Paris and London. Eje 04 is kindly and generously supported by the Graham Foundation.